Actress Alexandra Roach says the latest instalment of Channel 4 conspiracy thriller Utopia is likely to make for even more gripping watching.

Roach, from Ammanford in Carmarthenshire, is the star of the drama, which returns this month.

She plays Becky, a member of an online comic book forum who discovers a cult graphic novel manuscript – and then goes on the run from a shadowy organisation known as The Network, who wanted its contents kept secret.

Roach, who played a young Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, said the new series promises to be “very different” from the first.

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She said: “I read the scripts for series two on my bed like, ‘Oh my God’. It’s an incredible journey,” Roach, 26, enthuses.

“Series one was ambitious, but series two does become pretty epic. Global.”

It is the first time Roach has had to revisit a character for a second series, and she confessed to being a bit nervous at first.

Roach, 26, said: “We had eight months between series one and two, and I was hoping that character was still in me somewhere after doing loads of other stuff.

“It just felt more instinctive. Rather than thinking, ‘Oh, what would my character do here?’ it was like, ‘She’d definitely do this’.”

Most of the scenes were shot in the north of England and Roach said: “We shot for four months and we had this mad schedule. It takes a lot of time to shoot, so there’s not much time to mess about on set – you have to get to it.

“To unwind, we’d just hang out and chill. We found out that [Japanese restaurant] Wagamama delivered, and it was downhill from there,” she adds, joking that perhaps her role should have involved a corset after the takeaways.”

Utopia returns to Channel 4 with a double bill on Monday, July 14 and Tuesday, July 15